Electronic devices, for example, laptop computers, palmtop computers, personal digital assistants, cellular communications devices, point of sales machines and other suitable devices and combinations thereof have become an integral component in the mobile work force. Where personnel were once limited to working at a desktop or other static location, the advent of laptop computers and other mobile personal computing devices has made mobile computing the rule and not the exception. Mobility, though, has its disadvantages. First, lost and/or stolen computers have greatly increased the amount of sensitive information that has been placed into the public domain. An unfortunate by-product of such information loss has been the increase of identity theft over the past several years.
Additionally, the tremendous decrease in productivity resulting from the user reporting the lost/stolen computer incident, replacing and configuring a replacement system to equal that of the previous computer, potentially having to perform many projects for a second, third or more times and taking steps to ensure their identity has not been stolen, for example, reporting the incident to banks, credit card companies, credit bureaus and other corresponding organizations results in potentially millions of dollars in lost productivity time that companies and individuals cannot get back. As a result of the increasing incidents of lost/stolen computers, efforts have been undertaken to reduce the potential risks associated with such lost/stolen computers.
One such effort has been to equip computers, in particular laptop computers, with global positioning system (GPS) transponders that periodically send a signal to a monitoring station, such that the location of the computer can either be monitored or quickly determined. Additionally, the computer may be configured such that if the computer has not been used for a predetermined period of time, the unit will shut down and require the possessor of the unit to enter a password or provide some other form of authentication before returning to a full power or active state.
A drawback associated with the positioning solution is that it may require the computer to have an active network connection, for example, the Internet. If the lost/stolen computer is located within a building or in an underground structure, a network connection may not, and is often not, available. A drawback associated with the timeout solution is that it may be fairly easy to circumvent the protection by removing or turning off the corresponding timing hardware (e.g. counter) from the underlying system. Alternatively, the current unauthorized possessor of the computer may have obtained the password of the authorized owner or user of the computer without permission or knowledge of the authorized user; thereby, allowing unauthorized access to the computer.